A few days ago, I posted this entry for the Epic Battle Fantasy 13th anniversary contest on NG:

Seeing as all the progress images will clog up the already long description, and I've not got the energy (physical or mental) for anything else right now as I've received a slew of bad news of late, let me at least cleanse someone's timeline with some WIP screenshots.

There are many missing steps between the images, but to put a long story short: I did the whole artwork as an attempt at a therapeutic exercise. (I'm still feeling abysmal, but at least there's some artwork y'all enjoy.)

I drew individual enemies and coloured them on Sketchbook, and I also did the same with the huge red and white birthday candles. Then, I drew some rays and crumbling stones — also on Sketchbook — before going to PowerPoint and making a XIII stencil by just putting outline only WordArt into an outline only frame. Went back to Sketchbook, filled in the colour of that stencil, then back to PowerPoint and assembled together the basics of what would become the stained glass. Once that was done, I used the Reflection tool on PowerPoint, and cropped accordingly.

In a separate Sketchbook file I sketched, drew, and put flat colour for the various EBF characters and staff. Posture and gestures were very important to me; I wanted there to be some form of movement, life.

I combined that file with the stencil stained glass, and then began adding some light and shadow to the characters. I filled in the shadows first, then proceeded to do the glowing edges. The stained glass light felt brilliant and glorious to me; I wanted to convey that — I brightened the stained glass quite a bit, by adding layers of orange and yellow in front of and behind it, and then adding glow edges to our characters and staff. I also drew two layers of shadows beneath the characters, one completely opaque, and the other fairly translucent.

I don't remember where in the process I did this, but I drew the "lead" in between the glass fragments with the default black pencil tool.

I know that it can be, or it often appears, difficult to do something of the sort if one is only just getting into art. My intention behind this post is to demystify the process as best as I can. Getting an understanding of what went into a piece of work could inform our own thought process, and art (or music, etc.) may not feel like this Big and Scary Thing anymore.

I don't want it to be a big and scary thing. I want it to be accessible, and I recognise that there are many aspects to my two crafts that are simply not accessible to most.

At least let me start here. Hopefully there may be some things in this post that you might like to implement in your drawings, if you haven't thought about them before. I sincerely hope to see more of you being FPed who haven't had that chance for a long time; regardless, I am proud of you for your perseverance.

I'm not able to PM just now due to trauma, but when I'm better, if y'all wanna talk art, especially the finer points of how to draw things that I haven't mentioned in this post, feel free to drop me a line. I'll post again when I'm ready to talk again.